Sunday, October 12, 2014

The insular world of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem comes to the screen (with their blessings) in this warm comedy drama. Moshe (Shuli Rand) was once a secular Jew, but he rediscovered his faith and became an ultra-Orthodox Jew, and with his wife, Mali (Michal Bat Sheva Rand), he struggles to support their family.

With the harvest festival of Sukkot around the corner, Moshe is broke, and asks for help from a yeshiva charitable fund. Moshe is told the fund has been depleted, and he and Mali are left with no options but to pray for a miracle. To their surprise, the next day they're informed some money was found in the fund after all, and they are given 1,000 dollars; Moshe and Mali believe this is the miracle they asked for, and they joyously make plans to build a sukkah, a gazebo-like structure where Orthodox Jews entertain guests and serve their meals. Just as he completes the new sukkah, Moshe is surprised by the unexpected arrival of Eliahu (Shaul Mizrahi) and Yosef (Ilan Gannai), two old friends from his restless days before he embraced his current faith. Imagining the Lord has sent him guests as part of the miracle, Moshe takes in his old pals and tries to make peace with their rambunctious ways, but what he doesn't know is that the two are on the run from the law, having recently escaped from jail. Ushpizin was scripted by leading man Shuli Rand, who is in real life an ultra-Orthodox Jew and demanded a number of conditions before agreeing to participate in the making of the film (such as the producers agreeing to never show the picture on the Sabbath). ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Friday, October 10, 2014

(Reuters) - Patrick Modiano, a Sephardic French novelist, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature as “a Marcel Proust of our time,” The Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

French writer Patrick Modiano has won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature for works that made him “a Marcel Proust of our time” with tales often set during the Nazi occupation of Paris during World War Two, the Swedish Academy said on Thursday.

Relatively unknown outside of France and a media recluse, Modiano’s works have centered on memory, oblivion, identity and guilt. He has written novels, children’s books and film scripts.
“You could say he’s a Marcel Proust of our time,” Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told reporters.

The academy said the award of 8 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) was “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

His first novel ‘La Place de l’Etoile’, published in 1968, remains probably his best known book and touched on many themes that he would return to throughout his career, including the fate of the Jews under the Nazis.

Little of his writing is available in English but his roughly 40 works include “A Trace of Malice,” “Missing Person,” and “Honeymoon.” His latest work is the novel “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier.”

Modiano, reacting to the award, said he felt like he had been writing versions of the same book for many years.
“What I am keen to see are the reasons why they chose me … One can never really be one’s own reader,” he told a news conference in Paris. “Even more so because I have the impression of writing the same book for 45 years.”
The writer said he would dedicate the prize to his Swedish grandson.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said: “He is undoubtedly one of the greatest writers of recent years, of the early 21st century. This is well-deserved for a writer who is moreover discreet, as is much of his excellent work.”
Modiano, 69, was born in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt in July 1945, several months after the official end of Nazi occupation, to a Sephardic Jewish family with roots originally in Italy, and his ancestors, longtime inhabitants of Thessaloniki, Greece, included eminent rabbis.

Despite his august lineage, Modiano’s father, Albert, survived the war in Paris dishonorably, as a clandestine black marketer profiting from business deals with Nazis. As a writer, Patrick Modiano has spent decades sorting out his feelings about his heritage, but recently a slew of other French authors have taken up the job to help him evaluate his own family’s moral — and amoral — legacy.
His father was Jewish and his mother Flemish and non-Jewish. They met during the Occupation and that mixed heritage combined with moral questions about France’s relations with Nazi forces have played an important role in his novels.

“Ambiguity, this is one of the characteristics of his work,” said Dr. Alan Morris, senior lecturer in French at Strathclyde University. “There is an attempt to try and reconstruct some kind of story from the past, but it inevitably proves impossible.”
Modiano was a protege of novelist Raymond Queneau, famous for his experiments with language. Modiano has already won France’s prestigious Goncourt prize in 1978 for his work.

“Of the unique things about him, one is of course his style which is very precise, very economical. He writes small, short, very elegant sentences,” Englund said. “And he returns to generally the same topics again and again, simply because these topics cannot be exhausted.”
Modiano became a household name in France during the late 1970s but never appeared comfortable before cameras and soon withdrew from the gaze of publicity.

He is also known for having co-written the script of Louis Malle’s controversial 1974 movie “Lacombe Lucien” about a teenager living under the Occupation who is rejected by the French resistance and falls in with pro-Nazi collaborators.
“After each novel, I have the impression that I have cleared it all away,” Modiano told France Today in a 2011 interview. “But I know I’ll come back over and over again to tiny details, little things that are part of what I am.”

“In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.”
Jo Lendle, his German publisher at Hanser publishing house, said: ”He was an author that was on the list for a long long time.
“We waited with him and now he won the prize. We are overwhelmed.”

Bookies had made him one of the favorites along with Japanese writer Haruki Murakami and Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o. U.S. writer Philip Roth, a perennial contender, was also overlooked.
The most number of winners of the literature prize have gone to authors who have written first in English, followed by French and German. Modiano is the 11th person from France to win the literature prize - the last was Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio in 2008.

Argentina’s national security secretary, Sergio Berni, said Wednesday that police received an alert a week ago from Interpol of a possible plot to attack the Sociedad Hebraica.

The suspect, 57, was arrested Tuesday at an Internet cafe in Buenos Aires by the Anti-Terrorist Division of the Federal Police.
Berni declined to provide additional details other than to say that 1,500 security personnel had been deployed to 99 sites in the last week, which coincided with the Jewish High Holidays season. After a threat posted on Facebook last week, the Sociedad Hebraica was evacuated on the night of Oct. 2 and was closed the following day for security reasons.

“We are very satisfied by the actions of the police and the Justice Ministry in this case,” Julio Schlosser, the president of Argentina’s political umbrella group, DAIA, told Argentine media.

Buenos Aires was the site of two major attacks on Jewish sites in the 1990s. A 1992 attack on the Israeli Embassy killed 29. The 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center left 85 dead.